A new bioinformatics blog, Bioinformatics Zen, has a nice post on one of our favorite topics: organizing yourself as a dry-lab scientist. Essentially the file system is your friend, use it to structure your projects appropriately. I recall Neil posting in a similar vein a while back ?
I think it is about time to reorganize the recommended reading list in the side bar. It would be nice to have the list populated randomly from a database of links, so as new blogs can get some more exposure. The Drupal Links Package might be the way to go here.
Comments
File System + CVS + find/grep
The right solution for me is the plain old file system and the concurrent version system (CVS). And backups, of course. It helps to be able to find by date over everything, or search within what you have, by date, by size, by file type, whatever. If you're a unixy person, that's find+grep, but if you're an MS windows user, that's either cygwin (to simulate Unix [very well, it's what I use]) or something like the Google desktop.
Cluttered desktops are not just a Windows/Mac/amateur thing. I remember back in Fall of 1988 at Carnegie Mellon University, the fellow sitting next to me in the lab had an early HP unix machine with literally every one of his files in his top level directory. He started complaining that he needed a faster machine because the ls command was slow.
Bob Carpenter
Alias-i, Inc.
organisation
People underestimate the power of the file system hierarchy. Not only can it keep you organised, but there are plenty of tools around to read, process and display a file system tree. It's one of those *NIX things that makes you realise that a good OS tries to help you, rather than hinder you. I always cringe when I see the desktops of Windows users cluttered with junk.
I like the reading list idea - it is looking a bit stale. There must be lots of little Drupal tricks that we can employ to give the impression of constantly-updated content with minimum effort :)
I can relate to that...
The person who works next to me in my office has probably the messiest filesystem organization ever, with many directories with duplicated content (and not text files... we're talking about Affymetrix CEL files). I had to help her because she ran out of space (on a 100 Gb drive) just because of that duplication.
P.s.: I think there is an extra --> in the footer next to the CC license, probably a leftover from a HTML comment.
About the -->
I did notice this, but thanks for the tip. Drupal now seems to be escaping certain user definable fields that it wasn't in the previous version, like the footer. I'm still working on a solution, nothing obvious in the admin interface seems to turn off escaping outside of content filters.
So search is now working (it
So search is now working (it was broken due to a problem with creating temporary tables) which has lead me to this comment from 2002. I'm not sure if this is what I remember when I mentioned you had a post on this very topic (I don't think my memory is that good).
There is also the more recent GTD in the lab post, in the comments many people mention their use of the UNIX file system in project management.
Systems for systems
I think we all have our standard setups. I even wrote a dumbo little shell script to create a standard project directory hierarchy, complete with symlinks in the doc subfolder to relevant articles in my main pdf directory, courtesy of a little swish-e search.
I've recently migrated to the Getting Things Done system, in a last ditch effort to save my sanity. I've actually found that my fairly SOPs in the way I work are a good starting point for organisation, as they capture pretty much my entire workload in project terms (but not necessarily next actions).
Should we have a re-vote on the blogroll at the wiki?